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About a year ago. I thought to myself: Twitter is irrelevant, why should I care about SMSing on the Web? On the other hand, why do power users of social network apps such as Robert Scoble praise Twitter? I was curious, I started to try it out.

Beginning of this year, I realized a tremendous growth of momentum. Suddenly everyone in my business network started using Twitter and I realized that I had actually learned to love Twitter within the past year.

Why do I love Twitter? Let me tell you a story:

I was at a doctor appointment where the doctor told me that a certain medicine does not do any harm. Just the week before, I had an appointment with another doctor where I was told about one adverse effect that could occur with that medicine. Wondering which doctor is right, suddenly a thought came to my mind: If the later doctor twitters, let’s follow him and after one week of reading his tweets, I’ll have a good idea whether I can trust him.

That story sums up what is great about Twitter: If you’d like to assess the expertise of someone, read her/his Tweets. With each single tweet, you show what you read, think and do. You are what you tweet.

Twitter allows to build trust, tweet by tweet. Trust is the basis for a good customer relationship and referals, that’s what makes Twitter so valuable for online marketing.

Twitter is not only Microblogging, it’s also Microbranding. Twitter is perfect for individuals to build a brand on the Web. A company that supports its employees in twittering, will ultimately benefit from a more vivid and trustworthy brand.

I use Twitter mainly to brand myself as a knowledgeable person in the field of marketing Free and Open Source Software. My target audience is very Web-savy and quick to adopt new Internet-based communication tools such as Twitter.

Totally expectable, the sun has gone up and down for the past two weeks since Sun bought MySQL for $1 billion and we still trust in MySQL – do we trust in Sun?

In fact, Sun paid a high premium for MySQL’s credibility (aka brand value) to benefit from the high profile of the cute dolphin publicly. MySQL simply knows how to play the Open Source game right, that’s their largest asset. How high is it actually?

Let’s look at MySQL’s reputation management:

MySQL is everybody’s Open Source darling. Their consistent brand design created trust and allowed for the amortization of goodwill.

In the past 5 years, there was no proof of the viability of an Open Source business model without mentioning MySQL. MySQL is an Open Source thought leader.

When calculating MySQL’s forward-looking revenues and optimistically assuming growth of 100% per year, revenues should reach $1 billion in 2012 – but that’s still not profits amortizing Sun’s acquisition costs.

None of these numbers really explain the $1 billion price tag: forget about revenue, forget about profits, forget about the code – all irrelevant. Forward-looking revenues? Maybe, but they rely on assumptions about the continued business relevance of MySQL – something that is highly related to its brand.

Together with Lars, I tried to find a way how to reasonably calculate MySQL’s brand value. This is what we came up with:

Let’s keep in mind that MySQL’s fictious market cap is a 100 multiple of its profits.

Take Sun for comparison: Their market capitalization is roughly 15 times their profits.

When applying Sun’s brand value to MySQL’s profits, the expected acquisition price would be $150 million.

What about those additional $850 million that Sun paid?

As of today, a whopping 85% of MySQL’s economic value added can be attributed to its strong Open Source brand. If you are in general skeptical about the brand concept, The Brand Gap will open your eyes.

Xerox has a brand valuation of $6 billion accounting for 93% of its market capitalization.

Coca Cola is the leading global brand with $70 million brand value, that’s 60% of its market capitalization.

Hertz is bottom of the top 100 table, with a brand value of $3 billion.

Sun is not part of the top 100 and MySQL’s $850 million won’t qualify it either.

MySQL was able to negotiate a good price due to its brand value – and rightly so!

Everyone I ever met at MySQL is straightforward, honest, simply credible and focused on creating a trustworthy Open Source business. I am very sure that MySQL’s founders and top management agreed on the acquisition because they were able to develop a trustful relationship with Sun in the past years and realized that Sun is truly embracing Open Source.

MySQL will be able to provide a lot of input to Sun on how to become a widely acknowledged authority in the Open Source domain. Even better: MySQL will lead by example. You can tell from Kaj ArnÃ¶’s blog post about his new role as MySQL’s Ambassador to Sun that MySQL is well aware of their strong role within Sun: “We want to take Sun by storm”.

Sun is a hardware company who has been for a long time in a transition to also be a software company. In their software space they where first closed source but has lately started to change most of their software to open source/free software.

MySQL AB on the other hand is a company that was originally totally committed to free software / open source but who has lately changed to be more closed.

This deal will allow both companies to learn from each others successes and failures and build a stronger company than we would have been able to do separately.

I am very confident that MySQL will successfully help Sun become one of the main centers of the Web universe and it seems that some MySQLers hope for the best from sun. We will see Sun’s brand value grow significantly this year – not sure though if they will already make it into the top 100 global brands.

About

Sandro is the CEO & founder at CampaignChain, Inc., creator of the cockpit for digital marketing. Dad to 4, married to 1.